


even krayt dragons care for their young

by peradi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Gen, Tatooine Culture (Star Wars), Tatooine Folklore (Star Wars), a man making his way through the galaxy, daddy boba, good is not nice, how boba survived the sarlacc pit, just fic of boba because we need more of it, the fic where boba packbonds with an entire village
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:42:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28270338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peradi/pseuds/peradi
Summary: Boba Fett is left for dead for dead on the sands of Tatooine - but sometimes fate steps in to rescue the wretched.Or: the story of how it takes a village to rescue a bounty hunter; how Boba learned to fix up Fennec; and, most importantly, how kindness is a communicable disease.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 139





	even krayt dragons care for their young

**Author's Note:**

> i really just wanted to speculate about how boba survived the pit, and explore a bit about how he went from being a coldblooded dickish killer to a coldblooded killer that was marginally less of a dick. also, i wanted to explain how the heck he learned to fix fennec up like that.

The Sarlacc, despite what space farmers like to say, is not a creature of inherent malice. Yes, it sinks itself deep into a burrow beneath the sand, giving the impression of a terrifying whirlpool of teeth and saliva, designed purely to make the deserts of Tattooine more hellish than ever -- but is this not a sensible survival strategy? Huddled into the sand is the best way to keep its soft embryonic form safe from krayt dragons. Then, when it reaches maturity, its infant burrow serves as the perfect place to wait for food -- why expend energy when the meat will come to you?

The slow digestion? A little exaggerated -- nothing can last for millenia in anything’s stomach, not really -- but ultimately nothing more sinister than an adaptation designed to yank every calorie out of prey, in a planet built of famine. 

Nature is, ultimately, transcendent of any petty human morality. There is only one law of the desert, and it is the law of survival, heartless and hungry, the law of red teeth and venomous breath and the slow stalk of death in every shadow.

Boba had always subscribed to this notion, and refused to speak of dread monsters in myth, or angels amongst the stars: he’s a man making his way through the galaxy, and he has seen good and evil, and he knows that -- at the end of the day -- everyone and everything is part of the same relentless circle, birth and death and hunger. He hunts; he is hunted. He kills; one day he will be killed. 

However. He falls, and the sky is bright, the ships are jagged black shapes cut against it, the sands are gold -- and then he is forced through the Sarlacc's toothy gullet, and in that moment he thinks: _yes, this bastard thing is an_ **_evil_ ** _son-of-a-bitch_. 

\--

A Sarlacc's gullet is lined with teeth -- though _quills_ might be a more apt description, as they are slick and easy to slide _down_ on; it is only when you wedge a foot into the creature’s flesh, and start trying to push _up_ that you feel their bite. They are sickeningly sharp, scything into Boba’s armour, and if it had been made of a lesser metal it would have been cut open like so much paper. 

Heat-vision is no good here; the Sarlacc is radiant with warmth, and all he sees is a blurry mess of red and orange. Instead, Boba closes his eyes and starts to climb: trusting to his beskar, to his _heritage_. He is a Mandolorian, and he will not die like this. 

The creature attempts to swallow again, clearly wanting to dislodge the troubling obstruction in its throat. A noxious wash of saliva cascades over Boba’s head, stripping the paint from his helmet, and short-circuiting his equipment entirely. Now truly blind, he digs his fingers into the mucus-slick space between the quills. There are no gods he cares to reach out to, but the hard, stubborn rhythm of his heart is a prayer of another kind: _thou shalt survive._

There’s no notion of time here. His fingers first cramp, then ignite in icy shards of pain. His shoulders are twisted, fraying knots. And yet he climbs, because if he does not he will die, because at least if he dies he will die _trying_ , and he will obey that law, that most ancient and venerated of scriptures. 

Eventually, the quality of the air changes. Cold. Clear. It’s like a draught of clean water after drinking nothing but stinking soup, and he wants to weep at the taste of it. But there’s no time for that. He reaches out with his right hand, and finds that the throat is opening up. As his grasp slackens, the creature attempts to swallow again; but this has happened well over a dozen times so far, and Boba is ready, bracing himself against the quills. They rattle against his scarred armour like bones cast onto stone. Saliva gushes over his helmet, and the gullet constricts; for one hellish moment he cannot breathe, and then -- 

It’s over. 

Boba opens his eyes. His helmet, which has saved him so many times, is now a hindrance: a blinding carapace, befouled with Sarlacc saliva, the paint fizzling off with thin, audible _pops_. He grabs his cloak - -a slimy hunk of fabric -- and attempts to wipe his viser clean, but only succeeds in securing a sliver of visibility: a dirty yellow brightness that (he hopes) is the desert sky. He must be close.

He has no other choice. Gripping the throat quills with one hand, he removes his helmet, just as something large, wet and muscular slaps his back. The tongue. The kriff-fucking tongue. He’d forgotten that this beast has a tongue, and the force of it drives him face first into the side of the gullet, and the teeth sink in and his scream bubbles to silence in an outpouring of blood. 

The sacred rule. The only rule. The circle of the desert, life and birth and death, begat by blood and returned to the earth, and his thoughts are a scramble, a pained scramble that make no sense, and his father’s helmet falls. He does not even remember dropping it, only that one moment it is in his hand and the next it is not. But he can see. He can see, and his vision is scarlet, and his face is aflame, and the creature’s great tongue mashes against his back, and the acidic saliva finds the gap where his helmet joined his armour and starts to trickle in.

And, after a moment, it soaks through his clothing, and his flesh _boils_. 

\--

But if he does not climb, he will die; and if he is to die, he will die trying. And so Boba Fett climbs. 

\--

Boba finds himself a scrap of shade underneath a rocky overhang, lies still, and tries not to die. 

This is all he does for some time. Night becomes day, becomes night again. The sun burns, the moon freezes, and Boba Fett listens to the stubborn brag of his heart. His canteen, miraculously, survived its foray into the Sarlacc's stomach, and he drinks sparingly: three days of water will kill a man. Three weeks without food. Three hours in the Tatooine sun, if one is lucky, and three seconds in the presence of a drug-runner if one is not. 

In the end, he has no choice but to move, starting off in the purpling dusk, trekking across silken sands as the dark thickens and his acid-seared skin stretches and tears. It is pain beyond pain, the sort of pain that makes you no longer human, and by the time he arrives at an old moisture farming well, he has forgotten his own name. 

The well is a spike, white as bone, glowing in the desert moon. The stars are a spill of crushed diamonds against night’s velvet flank, and Boba uses his one working hand to prise open the well, and drink directly from the spout, gulping down water until he vomits, then drinking again, before filling his canteen to the brim, and washing off the blood and concealed filth encrusted on his flesh and armour. Soon, he is panting on the wet sands, the well guttering empty behind him. 

He needs to keep going; he must. He _must_ ; it is the law of the desert, the law of the heart, and he survived the Sarlacc, he will not die like this, he will _not_ \--

He takes one step forwards -- and then Boba Fett, most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy, collapses forward into the vomit-soaked dunes.

\--

“Holy _kriff_ ,” says Athla Giroth, thumb on her rifle’s safety, breath high in her throat. The tracker at her waist gives another shrill, reminding her that the well is down; with her spare hand, she mutes it. There, through the dawn mist rising off the sands, she sees a corpse, slumped in a slurry of blood, vomit and water. 

The corpse is bad enough -- though it is not the first time she’s seen one; Tatooine is a hard place to make home -- but it is the sight of the water glugging into the sand that sends a bolt through her stomach, equal parts grief and anger. Her knuckles whiten on her weapon, and she takes a measured step forwards, peering down her rifle, keeping the corpse in the sights, nestled in the crosshairs. All around it are footsteps -- Jawa, she surmises, judging by the fact that the poor bastard has all been stripped naked, sprawled there in a top and trousers, his feet bare.

“What have you _done_ ?” she says, addressing the desert in general, but the corpse in particular. There’s no response, so she pads closer. The sand squelches underfoot, and Athla can’t help but start a count: _one hundred credits worth of water...two hundred...fucking ruination --_

The corpse is a man, face down. His scalp is blistered and oozing clear fluid; his clothing is shredded, and covered in blood. Overhead, vultures circle in a dark flotilla, and Athla continues to remonstrate with her saboteur: “I’m already in _debt --”_

It is at that precise moment that the corpse twitches, hitching in a slow, wet, dragging breath.

“Sweet _Maker_ , you’re alive,” says Athla. The man turns his head to the left, revealing more angry red flesh: sun-ravaged, all but sloughing off the bone. One of his eyes is swollen shut, but the other is cracked open, black bright, rolling from sky, to ground, and back again. 

She could leave him to the desert’s tender mercies. No one would blame her, not really. Tatooine is a hard land, and there are endless tales of do-gooders who end up food for the krayt dragons. 

No one would blame her, but Athla doesn’t hesitate before shouldering the gun and sinking to her knees. “Can you hear me?” she says. “I’m going to help you, I promise…”

\--

For the first week or so, Boba sinks into delirium. He cries out for his father, and thrashes in sweat-slimed sheets; he sees, again and again, Solo’s face. Not twisted with hate, or malice: Solo is like the Sarlacc: bloodless as the desert. Heartless as the sand. Only aiming to live, the same as anything else.

(The Way is the way is the Way -- )

On the eighth day, his fever breaks. He wakes in a lowslung bed, the arch of a stone roof above him, light streaming in from a round window. There’s a woman watching him. 

“You’re awake,” she says. 

“Where -- where --” 

His lips are gummed together, his throat sand-blistered. The woman offers him a wet rag, and he suckles moisture from it like a starved infant. There’s a sort of pain that robs you of humanity, and a sort of struggle that robs you of shame: once, Boba might have been humiliated, sprawled out like spare flesh, drinking from a stranger’s hand -- but he’s alive, and right now this is all that matters. 

He shuffles back in the bed; the woman arranges pillows at his back so he can sit up properly. His skin is tight with healing scartissue, and every bone fizzles in its own private nova of agony. “Where is my armour?” he manages. 

The woman pauses, returning the rag to a howl of water at her knee. “What armour?” she says, her face showing nothing but bafflement, and in that moment the pain from his ruined body is forgotten, and inside his head is a hollow white howling. 

\--

Her name is Athla Giroth. She’s a moisture farmer _,_ and inherited the farm from her father, who died a few years ago. Boba had first taken her for a matron -- her brown hair is threaded with grey, and her hands are gnarled -- but she’s barely twenty two. The desert ages people. It drains the life from you. 

Well -- in Boba’s experience it does. By the fourteenth day, however, Boba has learned that this is not a universal truth: Athla’s cheer is as impenetrable as a krayt dragon’s belly scutes. She stays by his bedside for days on end, rebandaging his wounds, and keeping up a merry prattle that has him almost wishing that the Sarlacc's acid had got to his eardrums, not his scalp. 

“Don’t you need to tend to your farm?” he manages one morning. Athla pauses in the process of making her kaf, head quirked on one side. She moves and stands like a wading bird, all long legs and awkward pauses. Her lank brown hair is pulled back beneath a blue headscarf, and she wears a long blue linen dress over workman’s trousers and boots. 

“Oh no. Tanithra and Jacen will be doing it for me,” she says. “My neighbours,” she elaborates, at his questioning look. “We look out for each other in Fenella. That’s the town. It’s not really a town. More a village. Anyway, I watched their baby when Jacen was out negotiating with the Tuskan, and then got himself kidnapped, so Tanni had to go and get him --”

“--yes,” Boba rasps, the word struggling out on a ragged exhale. Talking is still agonising. The words _please shut up_ tiptoe onto his scarified tongue

“--so while she was doing that, I watched their farm, and now they’ll watch mine, and they have a speeder they’ll want to fix up so I’ll do that. I’m the engineer around here.” With this, she shows her hands: patterned with elaborate white scars, testament to a life spent fixing mechanics in a land where things like ‘safety precautions’ are viewed with deep suspicion. 

“A -- debt -- owed,” Boba manages. 

“And paid. Exactly. It’s like a circle. I help them; they help me. It all comes back around in the end.”

\--

“Can I help?” says Boba, indicating the heap of weapons Jacen is working on. The man looks up, squinting against the sun, his spectacles perched on the end of his hawklike nose. Jacen scavenges junk from the desert and trades with the Jawas for half-broken weaponry, fixes it, and sells it on. 

“Aren’t you meant to be on bedrest?”

“I would like to do something useful,” says Boba, with all the tact he can muster. He does not know these people, not really, and he is not in a rush for them to find out who he is. There are far too many people who would be all too happy to trade a king’s bounty in credits for Boba Fett. 

As far as the villagers are concerned, his name is Ulrik Condor. He hasn’t ventured any information about his past, and no one has asked. 

Jacen’s smile is conspiratorial. “She won’t shut up, will she? It’s exhausting. Come on. What do you know about blasters?”

“A bit,” says Boba, deadpan.

“Sit down.”

Boba sits beside him, on a ragged blanket spread out to protect the weapons from the sand. 

“We start by sorting them into ‘can fix and sell’, ‘can’t fix but can strip down for parts’, and ‘absolute garbage we can maybe use for something’,” says Jacen, picking up the stock of a Tuksen bolt rifle, the sort they use to put down Banthas, and turning it over in his hands. Boba watches Jacen work, and then starts in as well, taking far longer than needed to pour over each bit of junk, occasionally asking for clarification, even though he knows every piece by sight, as well as its approximate market value, and how it can be most swiftly fixed up into killing order.

The job is more interesting than Boba expected: there are some genuinely valuable artefacts, and it is the sort of thing that his father used to have him do, taking apart weapons, and putting them back together, learning through dissection. 

He loses himself in the task, and when it is finished he attempts to stand -- only for a bolt of pain down his spine to almost floor him. Jacen catches his arm before he crumples, and he leans against the other man, gasping in air, his face glossed with sweat. Another wash of vinegary agony sweeps over him.

“Easy,” says Jacen. Jacen is a few inches shorter than Boba, but he’s strong: the face of a scholar, and the build of a farmer. “It’s okay. Step at a time. Come on.”

Jacen escorts Boba back to Athla’s home, all but carrying him down the steps, depositing the bounty hunter into his nest of blankets. 

“Thank you,” says Boba. Lying down takes the pressure off his aching back, but the sweeping waves of vertigo remain. The world swims around him, and his mouth floods with saliva.

“It’s so easy to overdo it,” Jacen notes. “Athla basically had to tie me to my bed when I first arrived here.”

Boba accepts the glass of water Jacen offers, shifting from one arsecheek to another, in an attempt to find a way to lie that does not aggravate one of his umpteen injuries. He is not, as a rule, interested in the lives of others, unless they are people with information he could use -- but something, some long buried instinct, directs him to ask, “What happened?” 

“To me? I was a slave. I ran away, got caught, ran away again -- Athla and Tanni were out hunting and found me. Took me back here. That was about -- ten years ago, I think. Back when Athla’s Pa was alive…”

\--

“That armour is all that I have left of him,” Boba says, later that night, over a bottle of Tatooine’s finest moonshine. Saying the words aloud is like flaying off a strip of his own flesh, showing his tender red insides. It’s anathema to everything he is, laying out his weakness for the examination of strangers. Things would be different if he could walk for more than three feet without swooning like a maiden, or if he wasn’t crippled by migraines more often than not; if he was still _Boba Fett_ , not a man who called himself Ulrik Condor, hiding from the multitudes who want him dead --

And thus his choice is simple: tell them about the armour, and maybe find it, or keep its value sheltered close to his heart, nestled there alongside his dignity, and lose it forever. So he knocks back his drink, and lays his grief bare: a scabbed over wound that still, on hard days, aches. 

“We’ll look for it,” Jacen says. “We trade with the local Jawas enough to be the first to hear about anything new on the market.” He looks up to Athla, as if for confirmation, and the woman nods, wide-eyed and earnest in a way that Boba still finds suspicious. 

“Of course,” she says. Like it had never occurred to her to do anything else. 

\--

Fourteen Womp rats scurry forth from their burrow. Boba fires twelve times. All fourteen drop down dead. 

“--huh,” says Tanni. “So you were saying you’ve never done this before?”

“I said I’d never hunted _Womp_ before,” Boba says, “not that I had _never hunted_.”

\--

The twin suns rise, set, rise again. A month passes, then another. Boba shoots Womp, and repairs farming equipment, and gives the impression of being an incredibly quick learner.

( _Anyone would think you were born with a blaster in your hand_ , says Athla, and Tanni smirks at Boba behind her back.)

(They do not know precisely who he is, and they do not ask, but Tanni was a slave, and Kal Finna does not talk much, but he wears an old, battered badge marking him out as a member of the Guild, and Shyra still weeps in her sleep, wracked by memories of her time as a sniper. The point is: they can guess that he is more than he puts across, and they still do not ask, and they still do not care --)

His back aches less; the headaches start to recede. No word of the armour surfaces, but the knowledge that it is somewhere on this cursed planet keeps Boba chained to the desert. He’ll die before he heads out into the galaxy without his father’s helm, and his father’s heart. 

_(It is all I have left of_ **_him_ ** _\-- and of my_ **_heritage_ ** _, and my_ **_home_ ** _, and --_ )

( _I am a man making my way through the galaxy. And yet --)_

He starts venturing out: his earnings pay for a speeder, and he jets from one homestead to another, trying to find every obscure junk dealer he can. He daren’t show his face in Mos Eisley: even without his helmet, and with his voice roughened by the Sarlacc's acid, he could still be recognised. 

Instead, he sticks to the borderlands. And it is there where he meets Caxo Ferrent.

\--

Boba stops for a drink at a bar that is only a bar by the loosest definition of the word: it’s a house, which sells alcohol. There’s no space to drink inside: you climb down the stairs, pay for your booze (which comes in two varieties: ‘may possibly make you blind’ and ‘will definitely make you blind but is slightly cheaper than the other stuff) and then take it to a rickety assemblage of chairs and tables, under a Womp leather canopy. Boba sets himself down, and tries to flush away the disappointment of another lead gone sour.

“This seat taken?”

“Depends. What do you want?”

His hand on his weapon, his eyes hard. The bounty hunter -- for she is clearly a bounty hunter; it’s evident in the way she stands, alert to her surroundings, but confident that she could easily kill anyone near her -- has scuffed red armour and a hard, pretty face.

“Are you Ulrik Condor?” she says, holding her hands out, fingers spread, in the universal display of _I’m unarmed._ “Resident of Fenella, town a few days ride south of here?”

“Again. Depends.”

“I’m Caxo. Caxo Ferrent. I’d like to discuss a business deal with you.”

“Why?” says Boba. Caxo’s smile is thin as she takes the chair opposite him. 

“It’s about a girl,” says Caxo, “by the name of Ghiroth.”

\--

The next morning they go out hunting: Boba and Tanni and Shyra, riding dewbacks over dusk-blue sands, heading to the Womp nest that Tanni had sighted on her last ride-out. 

The dewbacks have a swift, swaggering gait that takes some getting used to; Boba focuses on keeping his hips loose, rolling to accommodate the lizard-beast’s strides, while also keeping his spine straight, ready to provide a solid platform to fire from. They ride in silence -- there is no Jacen to interject ‘interesting facts’ about the biosphere, and no Athla to chatter merrily about nothing at all. 

They approach downwind, catch the Womp unaware, and shoot five fat young males, enough to provide a feast for the village, with meat to spare; but they let the pregnant females go. The pups they will rear will be food in the months to come. 

They cut off the tails of the Womp, and let the dewbacks eat them: a reward for a job well done. The rest of the corpses are wrapped up in leather, to disguise the smell of meat, and slung over the spare dewbacks. 

It’s only as Boba is wiping his hands on his shirt (one that used to belong to Jacen, rough linen that is cool in the heat of day, warmer when night winds bite) that he ventures, “Who was Athla’s father?”

“A hero,” says Tanni, hefting the last Womp onto the dewback. She’s a handspan taller than Boba, and wears her black hair in long dreadlocks. Her skin is dark copper, and an X shape scar bisects her nose. “I was attacked by the Tuskens. My guts were sprawled out on the sand.” She unbuttons her shirt, lifts it to reveal a Y shaped scar. “He scooped up what he could, replaced the essentials with machinery. Doctor Bixby Ghiroth. Lived here for fifteen years, and he never turned anyone away. We...did not ask where he had come from. It wouldn’t have been right. He’d done so much for all of us, and atoned for anything ten times over…”

Tanni’s voice trails off; she clears her throat. 

“Always knew he was Imperial,” Shyra says, tucking her dirty blonde hair behind her ears. Her voice is the whisper of fine sand over bone. “There’s a way that their scientists stand --”

“Not that it _mattered_.”

“No,” Shrya allows. “It didn’t.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Tanni says. “He saved me, but that was after he’d been here a little while. We found him in the desert, him and his little girl, wandering, half-starved --”

“The girl was not starved,” says Shyra.

“--no. Dirty, and tired, and frightened, but not starved. He’d given whatever rations he had to her. They had stolen a TIE fighter, crash-landed it. Fleeing _Force-knows-what_.”

“We’re all fleeing something,” Shyra says, in her cobweb voice. 

\--

It is _laughably_ easy to take Athla Giroth away from her village. He says that he is taking his speeder out for a dawn drive, and invites her along; she agrees without a thought. Of course she does. He’s her patient, and she has to keep an eye on him.

They ride out away from Fenella, through hills that rear from the earth like fingers grasping for the sky. Seams of red rock blush gold as the sun rises, and Athla holds onto his waist, her forehead pressed between his shoulderblades. 

Fifty thousand credits, Caxo says the bounty is. Even split down the middle, that’s enough to buy himself some beskar: not an entire helm, perhaps, but if he gets the raw materials, and tracks down an Armourer then he could forge another. 

And he could tell them that the helm was bought with the blood of an imperial traitor. That he had, on the directive of another bounty hunter, hunted down that most challenging of prey: a trusting, wide-eyed girl, whose greatest concern in this world seemed to be caring for others. Yes. What a great prize for the most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy. Athla Ghiroth, whose only crime was to be born of an illicit union between an Imperial scientist and his research student. 

What a wonderful story that would be. What would he say? That Bixby Ghrioth had been famed for his developments in biological cybernetics, that had begun his career as part of the team that perfected the Death Trooper design, and ended it in a dustbowl town, saving a slave’s life with the same technology?

“Wait!” Athla shrills. Her voice has an uncanny ability to pierce through the roar of wind, and the morass of Boba’s thoughts. “Wait -- look here.”

“What do you see?” says Boba, pulling the speeder to a halt. Athla bounces off it, peeling her goggles up as she does so. Boba’s joints ache as he dismounts, and he follows at a far more sensible pace. 

“Here!” says Athla, scraping dirt and dead grass off a reptilian skull. “It’s a baby krayt dragon!” Her head is bowed, and the blue scarf she wears over her mouth is a clear target. One shot would paralyse her. Fifty thousand credits. 

“Dad always had this saying,” she says, “ _Even krayt dragons care for their young_. It was meant to mean that even the scariest things in the desert had things that they cared for; even the worst kind of predator still loved something. He always tried to see the best in people.”

The wind scurries over the land, casting a cloud of grit over the pair. Boba’s blaster is an iron brand at his hip.

“I mean,” she continues, giggling to herself; heedless of the knife-edge she is perched on. “It was a stupid phrase. Krayt dragons _don’t_ care for their young. They just lay the eggs and fuck off. But maybe that was the point as well. He was a dreamer.” She climbs back to her feet. “Sorry. I’m blathering. I know I talk too much. It’s just Dad spoke so little, you know? I learned to fill in the gaps.”

Her look back at him is apologetic.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I mean --”

“Do you have anything of his?” Boba cuts in.

“Oh absolutely,” says Athla, her face brightening once more. “I have his farm, and I made all the tools according to how he taught me, and I have the stories he told me -- I mean. It isn’t like he left me a necklace or anything like that. But I still have so much he left.”

She cups her hands over her heart, and Boba makes his choice. 

\--

“That was quick!” says Caxo, when Boba arrives at their meeting point, pushing Bixby Ghiroth’s daughter in front of him. Her hands are bound, her face messy with tears, and she can barely talk: instead, all she can manage are little hiccoughing sobs. Her right eye is purpling. 

“One traitor’s daughter,” says Boba. 

“Amazing,” says Caxo. “ _Amazing_ . Hello, Athla. You don’t know me, but I’ve been after your father for a _very_ long time.”

Athla whimpers. “P-please d-don’t hurt me,” she says. 

(Boba thinks that she may be overdoing it, just a little.)

“The credits?” he prompts. 

“Sure,” says Caxo. “Couldn’t have done it myself. These villages are so _wary_ of strangers. I’m glad that I had a man on the inside.”

“How _could_ you Ulrik?” whines Athla, and yes she is definitely overdoing it. Boba carefully schools his face into a mask of absolute blankness. There is _snot_ pouring down Athla’s face. 

“Business is business, sweetie,” says Caxo, and Boba’s stomach roils with disgust. He is a bounty hunter, but he never called his quarry _sweetie._

“The creds,” he prompts. Caxo smirks at Athla, and removes a leather pouch from her belt.

“Here you are, Condor,” she says, tossing it at him. 

It all happens between one heartbeat and the next. The credits, in the air. Caxo going for her weapon, expecting him to have his eye on the purse. Boba, pulling his blaster loose and firing out three shots. Caxo diving for the ground. Boba’s rusty: the first shot sails wide, the second clips her ear, the third strikes her squarely in the shoulder --

The next heartbeat. The next declaration: _I still live_ . And Caxo lands not on the earth but on _Athla_ , and the two women are tangled together; Boba hesitates for a moment, trying to line up a shot that will not hit Athla as well and --

\-- a _shriek_ , blood-gurgled and hideous. Caxo staggers back, her hands clamped to her throat as arterial blood spurts out in a great fountain, splashing over the sand, and over Athla’s panting, snarling face. 

Her hands are loose.

(They were never tied)

And she has a knife. Fathers die; it is what they do. But, if they are good fathers, they leave behind the means for their children to survive. 

(Bixby was never a fighter, but he made damn sure that his daughter was)

\--

“You said you were in debt?”

“Yes -- not to anyone super scary, just the Facestealers -- they _sound_ worse than they are -- but they’re not Hutts, they’re local lads --”

“Be _quiet_. Will fifty thousand credits cover it?”

\--

_You still have a place here_ , Athla says, and he believes her, but Fennella is not his home. And the longer he stays longer he _must_ stay, accruing debts and fulfilling them, the cycle that forms community, the cycle that Athla and those like her see as security, and he sees as a noose to choke in. Thus, he leaves, to the lonely desert, and solitude, and the star-strewn night, where no one knows his name, and where he can find his father’s armour in peace --

Well. Not quite. 

“No, do _not cut there_ ,” Athla squeals, leaping from foot to foot, her hands an agonised flurry in the air. “You -- look, you have to remember that if this was a real creature then there would be a lot of blood, and -- oh gods -- “

Technically, Athla owes him a debt: fifty thousand credits pays her debts five times over. Thus, Boba feels justified in demanding she teach him all she knows of cybernetics. To his mild horror, she accepts with glee, delighted at being a teacher -- even though she is a not a terribly good one, worried and irritable by turns, liable to overpraise.

He learns, sometimes wondering if it is worth putting up with his teacher’s chattering.

But then one day, years later, he finds a sniper wedged into a thin sliver of shade, her lips gummed shut with thickened spittle, blood matting her hair. At a distance, you would be forgiven for thinking that she was just another corpse.

But he is closer now, and he can see how her chest lifts a little; sinks a little. He kneels in front of her. She doesn’t respond to his presence. Her spirit is clearly halfway home to whatever bleak landscape awaits the dead and gone. 

He could leave her, of course. That would be, perhaps, the sensible thing to do. It’s what happens in the desert. Her bones will bleach white. The sand will polish them smooth. Perhaps a Tuskan raider will make a drinking cup of her skull. 

And yet his gaze is caught by her hands: cupped over her midriff, pale fingers a nest, holding her charred viscera inside her torso. The tension of her arms, even though her face is slack, flies starting to crawl in and out of her ears, supping at the mucus dripping from her nose. Conserving all her energy into that one point, where her hands hold her guts inside. 

No one would blame him for leaving her, but Boba does not hesitate, sinking down beside her in the dank, bloody sand. “I’m going to help you,” he says, “I promise.”   
  
  
  



End file.
